: : : : : : NEW YORK -- Headline writers, caption scribblers, and
copy editors may be the most polysemous people on Earth. So concludes
Valerie Collins, who has a fascinating article about journalism
and acts of polysemy in the most recent edition of The Vocabula
Review (http://www.vocabula.com), an erudite online journal dedicated
to excellence in the English language.

: : : : : : But first: Polysemy? "The phenomenon of having or being
open to several different meanings," speaketh Webster. Puns and
their cute cousins, paragrams, are vehicles for polysemous expression.
"Sidebars, subtitles, leads, and picture captions provide ... opportunities
for extended punning," Collins explains mainly in the plain (she
lives in Barcelona, Spain).

: : : : : : "Admittedly," she wrote, "the dividing lines between
true wit, cleverness ... and groan-induction are fuzzy." It's so
much a matter of individual taste that using such tools is really
in the I of the beholder.

: : : : : to parrot the conventional wisdom, puns are the lowest
fume of hammer, but are puns alone solo?

: : : : There is a tabloid daily newspaper in the United Kingdom
known as The Sun. It's the largest-selling daily newspaper by far,
owing to its combination of dumbing down the news and showing nubile
young ladies in a state of upper déshabillée whenever possible.
(Personally I believe it's extremly cunningly executed to work on
about 5 different levels, but I'm probably self-deluded). The headline
writers there are compulsive polysemists, although rarely clever.
However, once in a Scottish soccer match, when Caledonian Thistle
(nicknamed Cally, a backwoods semi-amateur team) beat the mighty
Glasgow Celtic (champions of Scottish soccer) by a score of 3 goals
to 1, the sports headline writers came up with this gem that is
so brazenly contrived as to be a real jewel. Half the back page
the following morning was taken up with this headline:

: : : : "Super Cally Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious".

: : : LOL! That's a hoot.

: : Just a bit about the 'Sun'. Years ago there was a notice on
a board at my daughter's school. It went something like this:
: : The Times: read by people who run the country
: : The Telegraph: read by the wives of the people who run the country
: : The Guardian: read by people who would like to run the country
: : etc
: : etc
: : etc
: : The Sun: read by people who don't care who runs the country,
provided she's got big boobs!

: Some background for our non-Brit playmates:

: In Britain (chiefly in England) we play a game you may have heard
about in legend: Cricket.

: Basically the rules are one bloke (the bowler) throws a hard
leather-bound ball at some other bloke (the batsman) who stands
by some sticks. Curiously this game is very popular on the radio.
An enormously successful radio commentator was one Brian Johnstone
(affectionately known as Johnners) famous for his dry wit and good
humour.

: He must have waited years for the day that the cricketers Peter
Willey and Michael Holding were playing on opposing teams, for on
that day, he got to say...

: "The bowler's Holding, the batman's Willey"

: And then he and his fellow commentators corpsed for a whole ten
minutes.

Some writer at Time magazine must have endured a similar wait before
being assigned to the Cannes Film Festival and reporting that Albert,
prince of Monaco, had been persuaded to attend. The writer said
(I'm paraphrasing here, but not by much) "This answers the age-old
question of how to get Prince Albert into Cannes."